New kid on the DLP block

When I was at InfoSec, my friend and Ingrian predecessor Norberto Costa, now at RSA, asked me if I'd seen Orchestria. I immediately got a mental picture of their stand at RSA2008, and realised that that was all I knew of them.

"Yes, they were at RSA," I said helpfully. When I got home I looked up their site and saw that they had an international presence, but an R&D centre in Taunton. For those of you not familiar with UK geography or anthropology, Taunton is in Somerset, on the west coast of the UK, which is not quite as cosmopolitan at the west coast of the US. Somerset is famed for its cider, cheese (Cheddar is in Somerset) and holes (Wookey Hole is a cave, near Cheddar), not its technology.

I dropped them an email, explaining my fondness of all things west country and my desire to speak to them, and managed to get a half hour on the phone to the CTO yesterday. I was most disappointed to find that he did not speak about combine harvesters with a Somerset burr. In fact he was very obviously a professional business man, as proven by his opening gambit.

"I was a technical specialist at Benchmark Capital, who invested in Google amongst others."

Benchmark paid for him to set up Orchestria, with proper funding, a proper team, and some real experience. This was in 2001, and I hadn't heard anything about them until last month. Since then I have been asked about them a number of times. For someone who pretends to be familiar with the data security space, this was slightly embarrassing. Not any more though.

"Orchestria was set up as a compliance tool, and was sold as such into very large companies for the last 5-6 years."

It was only the DLP bandwagon coming along which made them realise that they had something which could do that and a whole load more. If they are to be believed, Orchestria are beating the likes of Vontu in accounts where they appear together. I fully expect a mail from Kevin to explain why this is untrue, and will print it here in the interests of fair play. If this is the case, it is little wonder they have been so hyped recently.

Digging a little deeper into the technical side, Orchestria uses a natural language engine, hundreds of times faster than regex and other methods used in current DLP. They have 26 agents, covering every possible exit point on the network, on every popular platform. They cover email protection, which few of the others manage to do well. It all sounds very impressive.

I have yet to see proof, and I'm sure to get a barrage of emails from my other DLP contacts saying why theirs is better. In fact I hope I do, this is exciting stuff.

There you go Norberto, I asked.